CIA: Our Mideast Forecasts Kind of Suck

Twitter and the mainstream press are filled with rumors that Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak may be forced to step down as early as Thursday night. What does CIA Director Leon Panetta think? All he could tell a congressional panel on Thursday morning is that he, like them, is relying on the media for his info. According to those press reports, he said, there’s a “strong likelihood that Mubarak may step down this evening.”

Unsurprisingly, that didn’t satisfy the House intelligence committee’s leaders, who want to know how a spy apparatus that costs $80 billion annually didn’t forecast the Egyptian uprising. As spymasters have said repeatedly over the past two weeks, intelligence officials have reported for “decades” that unrest brews in the Mideast. “But we are not clairvoyant,” said James Clapper, the director of national intelligence.

Vague much? Clapper’s thick opening statement contained three noncommittal sentences on what’s happening in Egypt. (“Instability, fueled in large part by economic and political grievances, clearly has reached a critical point in recent weeks and will have a long-lasting impact.”)

Clapper and his intelligence colleagues at this morning’s hearing came prepared to get beaten up over not predicting the depth and the speed of the current Mideast uprisings. The director said he had reviewed “literally thousands” of intelligence reports on popular dissatisfaction across the region, and he thought intel analysts had done “yeoman work.”

But that defense came with concessions: Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali made a “snap decision” to abdicate. Message: spies can’t predict any of that.

It was up to Panetta to implicitly concede that he was fixing a problem. The CIA needs “better collection when it comes to the triggers that ignite these conditions.”

He’s put together a 35-member task force within the CIA to look at where the Mideast uprisings might spread next. The metrics to be examined: “the large, unmet expectations of the people in those countries,” the loyalties of the military, the youth bulge, and “the whole role of the internet and the ability to put a demonstration together in quick time.”

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) asked the obvious follow up question: How stable are the governments of Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan? In a public congressional session, Panetta declined to make any claim.

But he said “a number of countries in the Arab world” have the same problems Egypt and Tunisia face: “lack of freedoms, lack of political reform, lack of truly free and open elections, economic stagnation…. All of which means we have got to pay a great deal of attention.”